The Other Ships With 18in Guns - with Special Guest Drachinifel 

A buddy cop comedy where they moonlight as amateur investigators for naval mysteries. I see an iconic car, and catchphrases.

I would love to hear the BB NJ crew pop up as special guests in an episode (or two) of The Bilgepumps.

@@Plaprad Yes. So much yes. And a catchy opening a la Magnum P.I. or the Interceptors from Top Gear.

oh heck yes! sign me up!

Sign me up too. I really like these two guys and together they could do a vwry interresting show 😃

Which is pretty funny, since I'm 99% sure neither served 🤣 But I appreciate their enthusiasm.

@@JoshuaTootell - there may be very good reasons they could not serve which are probably not our business - I'm sure they both serve to promote naval careers better than any recruitment office - 🛸✨

@@JoshuaTootell strange comment

@@JoshuaTootell beeing a service man does not always correlate to beeing the best content provider on a certain subject.

I love ships as much, but i do not know as much as the hair on Alex' pinkie finger

Needs Jingles for 3rd. he is "just" a gaming youtuber but is an old RN sailor and knows drach and is just hillarious.

@@Zonkotronyes

One can really tell the depth of his knowledge when he goes off script and just tosses out a string of detailed, arcane, information right off the top of his head.

I wouldn’t mind shooting my 5 inch gun into Ryan’s belt armor…

2 good looking hunks.

the two youtubers i watch for Naval history. so cool to see them both together.

I'll take 2x1 every day and twice on tuesday

They look like they could be brothers too!

Brothers from different countries, I would say

Americans will always use anything but the metric system. Footbal fields, school buses, Ryan's etc 😄

@@davem2369 bacon is also a viable measurement for bullets

@@Grove122 You can't possibly leave that comment hanging like that! Give us some context here please 😂

@@RonGardener4142 the Apache chain-gun fires 30mm bullets about the length of an uncooked strip of bacon and it also shoots them around 650/minute.

@@Grove122 Would that be 650 Strips a minute? No wonder Obesitas is such a problem in the US.

I agree with the excessive part, especially as the 16"/50 and the super-heavy got really close to the performance of the US designed 18" gun. I don't think gun-blast perse was a major factor. More the fact that if you really don't want to compromise on other aspects of the ship, you really need a huge ship like Yamato, while you could have more ships, with more shells on target, with performance that is not that far behind an 18" gun. IMHO the USN wanted to be able to fight a BB engagement and win, but it also realized it would be mostly doing other things to actually win the war. The IJN really went into the mindset that they could humiliate a weak-willed Western opponent by crushing them hard in one grand battle involving subs, torpedo-engagements and a final BB clash and that the USN /RN would crawl back in their cosy Victorian era mansions without ever considering a fight again.

I do wonder a bit about the super-heavy shell, as one way they increased the weight was by shrinking the explosive charge. Penetration is important but some boom on arrival seems similarly important.

@Wick9876 Well, yeah. It's engineering, not magic - there's no such thing as "perfect," there are only tradeoffs to be balanced against each other. In this case, the choice was between bursting charge and penetration - with the context being that everyone expected navies to continue building battleships for decades to come, with 16" guns (and thus _protection against_ 16" guns) becoming the new standard. And after all, the Navy still had HC shells for when they just needed a bigger boom and didn't care about penetrating battleship-scale armor.

@@Tuning3434 Oh it is. Nelson's 16" guns would damage the deck and break light bulbs when it fired. Yamato's 18" guns could concuss anyone exposed on deck when they fired. Before anyone asks, AA crews. And in WW1 a ship's pet chicken got all its feathers blown off by its own guns.

The US had an 18 inch gun already in testing too and it had a super heavy shell weighing almost 4k lbs. But the era of battleships were ending so further development of a super battleship ended as Aircraft carriers became the more effective way of striking the enemy.

Scuppered would be a better word.

My friend Leo Champion has written an SF series with tanks that had 21” guns. I pointed out the ammo handling issues to him. He laughed, and pointed out this is far enough in the future that they’d have the handling equipment. Check out Desert Strike, it’s a great romp.

tbf an Iowa or Yamamoto would seem unrealistic to a WWI sailor

*Tillman on KRAK* How about, we arm our ship, with 24 guns in sextuple turrets!

@@waynesworldofsci-tech comity sf ? HAMMERS SLAMMERS much more plausible in tank format long time sf and military reader 1952 just saying

@@pamgettel9056 Leo was writing for fun. He also does some interesting stuff with the background cultures.

Same reason we settled for the 50 cal. For our fighters and bonbers, as opposed to more cannons like everyone else, we figured the 50 could carry more ammo on board, fire faster, and generally would be "good enough".

Yeah the N3 Class Hyper -Dreadnoughts would be hard in a post WW1 and Pandemic World

There's also one of the 101,000 theories of what the QE (or modified QE) class HMS Agincourt was going to be

Yep :)

@@Drachinifel 'start preparing another Chocomel bomb for miss Drach'

Would be a tough gig for a (seemingly) tall fella.

Drach looks like he about to the death star run

I saw that as well. I was surprised that no credit was given to Drach.

There is one thing the Iowa's have over both Yamato and Musashi don't. The increase gun caliber length. Yamato's and Musashi's guns were 46cal length. That's only 1cal length longer than the 16'/45cal Marks 5 and 6 guns that the Colorado, North Carolina, and South Dakota classes had. I won't lie, the 18.1' shell was heavier, however it was being fired out of a shorter barrel length than what the Iowa-class has. That 50cal length, coupled together with the mark 8 superheavy armor-piercing shell, is on par with, if not slightly superior to the punching power of the Yamato's bigger guns. Shell/muzzle velocity from longer gun barrel is basically key in overall performance of battleship guns. Also, I too watched Oceanliner Designs' video about the battle of the Denmark Strait several hours ago. The more you research, the more you'll learn something that was ultimately not mentioned or accidentally missed out.

Sure, there are many things to say about design and doctrines. For Bismarck in the situation it was, even relative limited damage was crippling enough to abandon the mission and try to recover the ship. And with German naval capabilies in '41, not an unreasonable decision. Yamato was build to really slug it out in the last BB clash with the remainder of a USN or RN fleet in the South China sea or East Pacific, or in ideal situations a confined space like the streets of Malakka under air superiority. And if you all chips in like the Yamato design did, it works on a unit level. I feel Yamato would kill everything or die trying. But for the IJN there was no recovery whatsoever after the 'die trying'. I understand why an 18.1" feels appropriate for them, but not claiming it was the wisest investment though. But in the end, WW2 showed time and time again that complex plans only work out if the enemy allows you to execute them, and there is a lot of merit to go for several 16" armed ships to have the extra operational flexibility. The USN had nothing gain from a 'die trying' doctrine. A fight hard, fight well doctrine feels more suitable because there is always a massive economic powerhouse an ocean away behind the fleet. In the End the USN was able to leverage there economic power and had the flexibility to not even have to engage Musashi or Yamato in surface combat.

This is true, however, bigger bursting charges give an advantage on a roughly equal number of hits. If your opponent can land 3 hits for every 1 you get, then the difference in damage per shot has to be very large to justify it.

@@Drachinifel Hi Drach! If you can achieve a 3-1 rate it doesn't really what the caliber of the main battery is.

Do you mean more videos together? If not and you're new to this channel and Drachinifel...better strap in.

Agreed - Very much like automatic weapons... which can throw more lead at the opponent per unit time. Now, if you could get an three 18" triples with the same rate of fire as a 14" or 16" - I'll take the 18".

@@fredinit Unfortunately, no one could make that happen.

If you ever get the chance to come in shooting distance ... And don't forget the thicker armour of larger ships with larger guns ...

You forgot about range.

@@1roanstephen Never say Never.

Theres a video out there showing the Japanese loading systems for the 18.1 inch, its pretty advanced.

But only for a spherical ship in a vacuum running the second latest version of libstdc++.

Well... maybe. It's debatable whether the Yamashiro was sunk by US battleship fire or by torpedo hits; it may have already been unrecoverably damaged even disregarding the torpedo hits: it was observed to be badly afire and suffering internal explosions from the gunfire. And if the fatal damage was from the US battleship gunfire, it's impossible to tell which one delivered the fatal hit. Also worth noting that if you go by Drach's reasoning, Washington didn't kill a battleship, it killed a battlecruiser. But at least (unlike Yamashiro) it's easy to conclude that Washington fired the fatal shots at Kirishima.

@@bronco5334 thats true, listening to a podcast on the pacific war, and re-reading Neptune's Inferno, she is always listed as a BB, Drach seems to be the only one who refers to them as battlecruisers, which they were.

Stop bringing practicality into it, everyone knows that bIgGER is mORE bETteReST.

You’re lowballing it by a lot. An 18 inch shell is about 42.4% heavier than a comparable 16 inch shell